Archive for beer

Growlers are awesome. While I am obligated to say so because of my day job, I actually do believe it. Growlers allow you to get fresh beer from your local growler fill station to enjoy on your couch, by the pool, on a picnic, or wherever your beer drinking heart desires.

Regardless of where or why they were created, growlers have become an integral part of the craft beer movement here in the United States.

So, you’ve gone to your local brewery or growler fill station, purchased a new growler, and gotten your favorite beer. You’ve grilled out with friends and shared your growler and it now stands sad and empty. What do you do?

First, rinse it out with water and then wash it. Unless you are a home brewer (if you are a home brewer you already know how to clean a growler) you probably do not have a stiff brush that can get down into the bottom of the growler and scrub it clean. However, if you rinse it out after its contents have been emptied into your belly, you should not need to use a brush. The best way to clean it is to drop in a dollop of cleaning detergent (best is unscented and non-bleach based), run warm water to fill it to a little less than half. Hopefully you have not thrown away the cap because now you are going to reseal it and shake it. After a few seconds pour out the contents and then rinse it out until there are no more suds.

Once you rinse out the detergent you will need to rinse it with sanitizer. That’s to eliminate odors and any other bugs that will affect the taste of your next fill. You can get a good sanitizer from your local home brewing shop. Most sanitizers are simple to use: place a little in the growler and fill with water. Just follow the directions on the package on how much you will need to sanitize the growler. Usually, once the sanitizer is introduced to the growler you pour it out again and then let it air dry. Once it is dry it is ready to be filled again.

Now, the growler is cleaned and sanitized. You are ready to go and get it filled. Here is a last bit of advice that will help improve the taste of the beer and will help the growler station not waste beer in the form of foam: If at all possible cool the growler off in a refrigerator or in a cooler before you bring it to get filled. This can be hard especially as the weather turns warmer in late spring and summer. Now, if you come see me or my compatriots at Craft, bring your growler and have us put in the cooler for you as you have a pint and maybe a bite to eat before we fill it.

As I said, this does two things. One, it keeps the beer from changing temperature drastically which will affect the taste at the end. Two, it helps the person filling it by getting the temperature of the glass (or metal) close to that of the beer, keeping the beer from foaming up too much during the fill. Now, you want the growler to be cool, not frozen. If ice forms inside it will also affect taste. That is the one of the reasons you should not freeze your glasses at home when drinking craft beer.

Once you have the growler filled and you take it home, in my opinion, you have about 7-10 days to drink it at its optimum taste, if you don’t open it. If you do open it and have a pint and then put it back in the refrigerator I would say you have another 2-3 days before you affect the taste.

If you do these things you will take care of your growler and give yourself many good beer experiences.

I get a lot of questions about beer styles. We have a lot of people who are just getting into craft beer or have gotten into craft beer but think IPA is the only craft beer and it is certainly the only one they have ever drank. So, this week, I will describe the major beer styles.

Beer is primarily broken up into two major categories: ales and lagers. Now, lager beers are bottom fermented (for the most part). They ferment at cooler temperatures and for longer periods. That makes them clearer, crisper, and cleaner in appearance and taste.

Ales are top fermented and the first style of beer discovered. They ferment at a higher temperature, close to room temperature and have a shorter fermentation time. They tend to have a fruitier aroma and more complex taste and the yeast can sometimes hang around giving a cloudier appearance.

Now under each of those groups there are numerous styles. This will not be a complete list. There are far too many styles and substyles for a beginning craft beer drinker to absorb. Depending on who you go to for information there are somewhere over 70-90 different styles. For a complete list here is the Beer Judge Certification Program and the CraftBeer.com list from the Brewer’s Association.

Lagers

Lagers – Malty and darker than pilsners.

Pilsners – Crisp, light, and a brighter hoppiness then lagers.

Bocks – Similar to pilsners, but maltier.

Ales

Pale ale – The style that started the craft beer revolution in the United States. Light appearance with a touch of hop bitterness and flavor.

IPA – A pale ale with more hops and more alcohol. Originally created to withstand the trip from England to India in 18th and 19th centuries. Adapted by American brewers to be as hoppy as humanly possible

This is the biggest question I get: What is the difference between a pale ale and an IPA. I often get told by customers I like pale ales when what they mean is I like IPAs. They are different categories and have different attributes. First level beer nerdery: knowing the difference between an American IPA and an American Pale Ale.

Brown ale – Maltier and darker than pales. More toasty and chocolate in taste then pales but still has a good hop presence.

Porters/Stouts – Really dark in color and little to any hop taste. Can be sweet are really dry in taste.

Then there are smoked beers, sour beers, Belgian style beers and other random hybrids. Smoked beers use malt that has been smoked with some type of wood. Sours are usually made sour by some type of wild yeast or bacteria introduced during the fermentation process. Belgian style beers are a variety of fun sours and fruit based beers that deserve their own blog post. Hybrids are beers that combine the yeasts and fermenting processes of lagers and ales.

If you are a craft beer newbie this should be a good start in craft beer. If you want to go even more in depth I would recommend the Beer Judge Certification Program website and the Craftbeer.com website to get started. Those are good resources for anyone at any level of craft beer nerdom.

Hello, fellow beer travelers, this is the first installment of the Beer Counselor. Whether you are a craft beer geek, craft beer server, or craft beer newbie, I hope you can enjoy the friendly advice I plan to dispense here.

For the first question I want to take on “just give me your favorite beer.” As a bartender I here this from customers a lot. Honestly, that is a horrible thing to ask your beer server. Don’t do it. Please don’t do it. It isn’t that is a bad question, it is an incomplete question. If you go to any good craft beer bar, Craft Tasting Room is one such place, tell the bartender or server what beers you like or what kind of tastes you like. They will give you recommendations and let you taste a couple of different beers and let you decide. You can also get a flight with a few recommendations from the bartender and really explore a few beers at once.

There are two reasons “just give me your favorite beer” is a terrible thing to ask a bartender. The first is taste is completely subjective and if your bartender is a beer geek he may have really weird likes. What I like, another beer geek may hate (hoppy beers, sours, smoked beer, etc.). I’m a beer geek, and we may like weird things that you will detest. At any given time, there might be some single hopped American IPA, a lambic, or a smoked beer that I really love on tap. If your favorite beer is Samuel Adams Lager or Stella Artois, and this is your first time tasting a sour, you probably won’t like it.

True story (anyone who works in a craft beer bar has similar ones), one Friday or Saturday night a customer tells me has never been to Craft before and is just getting into craft beer. He asks me what my favorite beer is, I tell him and he says, “Great let’s go with that.” I try to explain that this beer is a sour and give him an idea of what it tastes like. Before I offer him a chance to sample it, he cuts me off and says, “Just give me the beer.” I say, “OK” and get him his beer and he pays for it. I go to help another customer, but out of the corner of my eye I see him flag down another bartender and gesture to his beer as if it is crap and ask for another beer. Now, I’m sure instead of learning the lesson to ask for help from people who know a subject better than you do, he blamed me for giving him a bad beer.

That leads to the second reason it is a bad question. Your bartenders and servers are there to help you have a good experience. We want you to get a beer you like because if you get a beer you like and have a good time, you will give us good tips and you will come back. If you help us a little bit by giving us some parameters to advise you, we can help you a lot. I don’t know if the guy I tried to help had a good experience or not, but I don’t remember seeing him since.

That is what this is about, you having the best experience you can when you go into a craft beer bar. Whether you have been drinking craft beer for years and love rauchbiers or you heard about these crazy IPAs from a co-worker the other day and you really want to try one, let us help you find something you’ll like and enjoy. So, in a nutshell tell your bartender what you like if you don’t see anything you recognize on the tap wall and ask for samples.

One last thing, be open to trying different things. You may tell your bartender what you like and they will come back with something that doesn’t look anything like what you described. Trust me, taste it. If you have a good bartender who knows everything on the tap wall and knows what you are describing, he may surprise you with something you did not think you would like, but is actually perfect. That is the joy of craft beer (and most anything actually). Being pleasantly surprised and expanding your world just a little bit.

I have 3 things in my life I really like to read about, talk about, and write about: craft beer, college sports, and US soccer. As it happens, we are in very interesting times for all three of those things. They are all in places that could be called adolescence (for craft beer and US soccer) or midlife crisis (college sports).

40 Years In The Wilderness

I remember the 40 years in the wilderness. The 40 years for US soccer between World Cup appearances. In international soccer, not playing in the World Cup is the wilderness. It means you are irrelevant. Those days saw the NASL burn out like a wayward flare and youth soccer and college soccer become the apex of soccer achievement for players and coaches. Then, in 1989 Paul Caliguiri scores the goal against Trinidad and Tobago (I watched in a friend’s basement as ESPN showed some borrowed feed with Bob Ley and Seamus Malin calling the action from Bristol) 25 years ago. That goal put the US in the 1990 World Cup, the last they could qualify for before hosting in 1994. Without that goal, there is no Major League Soccer, no quarterfinals run in 2002, or the heightened expectations of a country used to winning and dominating at everything it does.

That is why I call this period an adolescence for US Soccer. Modern US Soccer did not begin until the late 1980s. In terms of soccer history that less than 30 year period is a blip. Soccer in this country has taken its first steps, World Cup qualifying and quality professional first division, now it is trying to move from the callow youth with all this untapped potential to a successful adult taking the world by storm. That has led to a lot of the problems that come with adolescence. In that period from youth to adulthood, your adolescence is spent trying to figure who you are, what you believe, and what is your voice.

That is what US Soccer is doing right now. Its constituent members, its fans, and the media who cover US Soccer are all asking questions right now. Should a young player go abroad to play, or stay and work through the US/MLS development system? Should the national team play a more possession based system that values keeping the ball or should it play or a more counterattacking system that absorbs pressure from the other team? How do we get more athletes access to quality coaching and playing in a country this vast geographically? Throw on top of that the inevitable jockeying for primacy and power within the structure of US Soccer and a lot of silly things are being said from anonymous sources to the media.

Just as it takes time and missteps to work through those fundamental questions as an adolescent it will take time and a lot of pain and hurt feelings for US Soccer to answer those growing pain questions.

The beer industry in the US spent its own time in the wilderness with the passing of Prohibition on through the 1970s. That puts modern existence of craft beer in the US in much the same position as US Soccer. What it means to be a craft beer brewer is one of those internal debates that most consumers don’t notice or care about, but is actually important to the future of the brewing industry in this country.

On one level (the level most consumers see it) it doesn’t matter where your beer comes from or who makes it as long as it is good. On the second level it matters immensely. The vibrancy and growth of craft beer in the US is primarily attributed to the idea of the independent brewer making good beer apart from and in many cases in spite of the big brewer’s influence/interference. That is what takes it from merely an industry into a craft.

This fear is well founded if you look at an industry like movies. The reason most of the movies you see and read about are comic book movies, adaptations from television or books, remakes of previous movies, or sequels/prequels is that there is almost no American independent movie movement anymore. Today the movies that get made are either micro-budgeted shorts that the director puts up on YouTube in hopes of attracting a studio’s attention or a superhero yarn that costs triple the GDP of a third world country to make.

However, just as I think some kind of market correction is coming to the movie industry where enough people will get tired of seeing cities and planets destroyed by aliens and go back to movies about people talking, I don’t think independent craft brewers will ever disappear. We are just in a period where the big multinational brewers (or beverage companies/conglomerates) will figure out how to tap into that market and the independent craft brewers will figure out how to leverage those multinational’s interest into making better beer.

Again, it is that adolescent process of figuring out who you are in a big complicated and convoluted world. There are no easy answers and no quick solutions.

The Midlife Crisis

The NCAA and college sports have been around since the turn of the 20th century. Almost since the beginning it has had to endure a push-pull between providing athletes the opportunity to gain education and making money off the on the field efforts of those athletes. However, I think now the NCAA and its member institutions have entered a time that the money is so great (for two sports: football and men’s basketball) that coaches, administrators, and institutions are compromising their primary responsibility, to educate, in order to keep making money.

Much like adolescence a midlife crisis is a moment when you step back and assess who you are and what you believe in. Usually, people who go through midlife crises have been successful, but they see the end is closer than the beginning. Whereas the adolescent is asking, “What can I do with this unlimited future,” the middle aged ask, “What legacy am I going to leave behind?”

The midlife crisis questions are harder because they often require a change in mindset and a change in path. The adolescent is discovering their path while the middle aged are often creating a new one from an already heavily traveled road.

The road the NCAA has traveled down took a wrong turn somewhere. Maybe not a turn, but it veered to the left fork instead of the right one. At some point the NCAA took its eye off the primary mission of its members, to educate, and became more about sports-entertainment. (This blog post at The Classical does a better job explaining this then I can.) I don’t think it was intentional or done out of greed or malice. Nor do I think it was any one decision that set this path.

Regardless of whether you think amateurism and the concept of the “student-athlete” are arbitrary creations to hold on to money, power, or status or you think they are the bedrocks onto which a whole belief system and way of life that should be protected is based, you must agree that the NCAA cannot go on as it currently is. The NCAA has incentivized a system of graft and cheating by hording all the money it makes into the hands of a very few and none of those being the actual athletes. This money comes from both the NCAA Tournament television contracts, the television contracts the individual conferences have all signed, and the College Football Playoff contracts. Those last two categories are actually outside the purview of the NCAA proper, but everyone who participates in those contracts are members of the NCAA.

Intercollegiate sports will not exist as we know it in 20 years. I believe athletes will have contracts. They will sign for a certain amount to go their education and perhaps bonus money that will probably (at the very least) include money from any ancillary sales produced by their name or likeness (i.e. jersey sales). Athletes will be allowed to do endorsements outside of the school and sign merchandise and memorabilia for money. Now, the schools will include a non-compete clause with penalties in the contract so that the athlete can’t just jump from school to school and they would have minimum academic requirements (probably the same as the rest of the student body) in order to remain eligible to play. I stole most of this from Jay Bilas.

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The most complicated and sometimes painful part of life are those moments when you have to stop and truly look inside yourself and ask, “Who am I and what am I doing here?” US Soccer, craft beer, and the NCAA are all in that place. This time is full of opportunity and hope. It is also filled with fear and trepidation. Yet, these are the most interesting and fun times because they are full of possibility. You can become or do anything.

Since I am studying the Road To Cicerone: German Beer Styles Course I have had German beer styles and lagers on the brain. I am just finishing up the fermentation section (I just have to finish the tasting activities) and that has me deep into lager and ale yeasts (and weissbiers).

This corresponds to a conversation I had with a patron at Craft last night. He ordered a couple of flights and with it being Sunday I had a lot of time to talk to him. We were talking about the beers he had and his favorites from the flights. We also explained a couple of beer styles to his girlfriend. At some point we got into a local highly respected and loved brewer who specializes in following the Reinheitsgebot.

We both agreed that the beers are all very good and very well made. I happen to absolutely love their dunkel. We also happened to agree that their new space is gorgeous and a great place to sit back and enjoy a beer or five. However, we both agreed that lagers are not our favorite beers. No matter how well made and high quality a beer maybe neither one of us gravitate towards lagers.

The discussion question for the fermentation unit in German beer styles course asks you to pick your favorite beer and choose an alternative fermentation organism and explain why you choose it. My main trouble with this question is trying to pick a favorite beer style. I guess, if forced, I would pick brown ales, but I go through periods where I just want to drink porters, ipas, stouts, saisons, tripels, dubbels, etc. For the sake of this question I will say brown ales.

Using a lager yeast instead of ale yeast for a brown beer basically gives you a schwarzbier. So, I would actually be interested in what would happen with a classic brown ale malt bill is fermented with Brettanomyces. Brett isn’t naturally sour (that comes from the addition of lactic acid in conjunction with brett), so I would hope for a fruity clove-like taste to go with the caramel or toffee flavor from the malt. This would be more of a dessert beer mimicking fruit dipped in caramel or toffee.

That’s my answer for that question. Now, back to the question of ales vs. lagers. I prefer ales because ale yeasts provide a greater complexity of tastes and aromas then do lager yeasts. There is no other real explanation. I drink both, but my preference leans towards the esthers of ale.

Drinking most lagers is satisfying in the way a diner is satisfying. There are no bells and whistles, just good food infused with a straight forward soul. You can also get meat and vegetables at a tapas restaurant, but that is where the difference ends. A tapas restaurant gives you complexity through different flavors and textures and allows you to mix and match for a different experience every time.

Both places serve food that makes you happy, but they have different ways to do it and play different rolls in your food experiences. It is the same with beer. Depending on when and where you are sometimes you want a solid lager and sometimes you want a complex ale. In beer terms I prefer ales, but in food terms I prefer diners. A diner that serves good craft beer would be ideal.

These Employees Won’t Have To Go To Work On Thanksgiving – As a former retail worker this hits close to home. Companies are going to find out that opening on Thanksgiving is a bad idea. One, it doesn’t increase sales for that week because it just lets the people who are going to shop first thing on the morning on Black Friday sleep in and do the rest of their shopping later. Second, its just going to piss other potential shoppers off because you are invading your workers and your shoppers holiday.

The inside story of how new MLS team LAFC went from dream to reality – As a soccer purist, I would love promotion and relegation to be a part of the MLS. As someone who just missed out on the NASL glory days, lived through the years in the wilderness with no top flight soccer league, watched as a MLS contracted wonderful to watch teams that were horribly business manged, what Henry Nguyen says here (“They were like, ‘Wait a second: First of all, there’s no relegation? All right, you got me!'” Nguyen, 41, said with a laugh.) should not be forgotten. The people putting up the money to buy a team and build stadiums want as much of ROI guarantee as they can get and the possibility of going from hosting the LA Galaxy to the Carolina Rail Hawks is not something they want in the equation.

The 100 Best Beers in the World – Judging beer is a completely subjective concept and I usually look at lists like this with a cringe, but the sheer size of this list and the number and breadth of the contributors from the craft beer world makes it a good one.

FIFA: Qatar 2022 winter World Cup likely, Jan-Feb or Nov-Dec ‘options’ – I can’t decide if I think the World Cup will be in Qatar in 2022 or not. On one hand you have the heat, the slave labor, and the sense that the whole way it was chosen was one of the dirtiest processes in the history of international sport. On the other hand, FIFA and its leaders are full of DGAF.

Finding Marlowe – How many interesting stories like this are out there? So much of history is obscured or lost simply because of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. I don’t want political correctness in history, I just want truth. I want to know the full history no matter how ugly it may be. Also, the history of Los Angeles seems to be filled with fixer guys like this through out its history and more then any other city in the United States.

Are You Genetically Programmed to Hate Hoppy Beer? – Its amazing how much of our genetic code was written when humans were hunter-gatherers trying to survive to the age or 35. This is the most plausible explanation as to why we like the taste of things we do and how much of that comes not from our genetic affinity for something, but because of how we learn from others around us.

What Is An Ending? ‘Serial’ And The Ongoing Story Of Wanting Too Much – One of the more interesting things I read this week, but the link on NPR is broken. In this blog post on Monkey See, Linda Holmes writes about our expectations of fiction is that it will always find “closure.” She is writing about a new true crime podcast from This American LIfe called “Serial” and how some people have voiced the idea that they will be disappointed if there is not some type of satisfying ending. That is what people mean when they say closure and they want closure out of their fiction and their stories because it is a concept that doesn’t exist in real life. In real life relationships and situations stop with no warning and often with little to any satisfaction. If the link worked you would love reading it.

How Your Brain Decides Without You – This is a really interesting read on how two people can watch the same event, read the same book, see the same facts, and come away with diametrically opposed views on what they just experienced.

Sea of Crises – Speaking of closure, I think I like this because it doesn’t resolve anything at the end. It just kind of ends with the anticipation of something ending or beginning, you don’t know which. This is the most interesting article on Sumo wrestling you will read all year. It also touches on Japanese literature and a little post World War II history.

Since I subscribe to all the magazines, blogs, and Twitter feeds of the craft beer world, I read a lot of the craft beer origin stories. The ones where the writer describes getting their first taste of “real” beer and how the world opened up right in front of their eyes. Usually reading one of these I can literally see the sunshine and rainbows appearing and a choir of angels coming down from heaven.

Yeah, that didn’t happen for me. I don’t think any of these writers are lying, I just think memory is a fickle and sometimes malleable thing. Memory and emotion can sometimes conspire to create the best possible scenario for your history. We all would like to think of ourselves as the hero of our own story and sometimes we reconfigure memories unconsciously to accomplish this.

However, everytime I read one of those stories I try to piece together my origin story in the craft beer world and always come to the conclusion that there isn’t one moment.

Because I was a good young man who never let the demon alcohol pass his lips before he turned 21, lets go to 1995. I may or may not have had enough of Bud Light and Milwaukee’s Best (aka “The Beast”) to know I wasn’t going to waste my money on those things so I always scraped up enough money to buy Sam Adams, Bass, Newcastle, or Guinness.

Well, at some point I got tired of those offerings and noticed this other beer beside Sam Adams in the beer case, Pete’s Wicked Ale. This was different. It was an American beer that tasted more like Bass or Newcastle. No heavenly choir and no sunshine and rainbows popped out at me, but the world did shift a little.

Around the same time I was walking through the UNC Student Stores and looking at books when I came across America’s Best Beers by Christopher Finch and W. Scott Griffiths. It was a listing of 350 “microbreweries” and brewpubs in the United States. Now, if there were any epiphany moments this might have been the closest thing because this showed me how much more beer there was out in the world. (In a true origin story, this would be the moment where the young man who has hidden powers discovers a magic book that brings these powers to the fore and he begins his journey to be the most powerful wizard ever. The number of people who have amassed fortunes peddling in this kind of goofiness is astounding and inspiring.)

Of course this book came out right before the first craft beer bubble burst. Flipping through the books pages, is a time capsule of breweries that no longer exist. That includes my Pete’s Wicked. Too many people making too much crap beer nearly sunk the industry around 1997.

So, after the collapse I spent a few years drinking a lake full of Sam Adams, Bass, Newcastle, or Guinness and even went through a period of deep diving into wine. However, the craft brewing industry came back and I came back to the sweet nectar of malt, hops, yeast, and water.

Is there another “adjustment” coming for the industry. Probably, most industries go through these changes at times of high growth. With new breweries opening every day, some are bound to fail for any number of reasons: bad beer, bad business practices, bad location, etc. To combat the growth of craft beer and their own declining sales the big global brewing conglomerates are throwing around money to pick off any of the craft brewer willing to sale.

Craft brewing in the United States has survived teetotalers, Prohibition, the mid-20th century consolidation, and the 1997 bubble bursting. I don’t think this new round of global consolidation is going to kill the innovation that has fueled the industry. In some way, shape, or form there will always be craft beer in the US and someone there to drink it.